Monthly Archives: October 2014

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt I have a 20 something friend who owns a successful small IT business of about 40 people. The company has no management structure. Legal, H/R and accounting are all very simple and outsourced. Marketing is done through social media and everyone in the company is considered a salesperson. From an operations perspective, a backlog of work is posted to an electronic billboard …

Face it, agile is popular and here to stay. A PriceWaterhouseCooper 2012 global survey found that 34% of private companies implemented Agile management in 2012, up from 27% in 2011 and 24% in 2010. Agile methods in project management was the number one article topic for readers of PMI’s PM Network journal in 2012. Let’s set aside all the ignorance arguments for now and the difficulties of changing the organization structure to become more agile. …

“Once you have something so deeply infused in your culture and your brand, it would be very difficult to reverse that inertia if you wanted to.” – Andrew Mason Despite agile’s wide popularity across all business sectors and organization sizes, companies today still struggle with organization agility. A 2012 report in the Economist claims that organizations are reporting they are less agile today. In fact, over a four year period, the number of organizations that reported they …

Test-driven development (TDD) is one of the plethora of acronyms used to describe what an agile software development process is. It has violent detractors and supporters often locked in futile arguments based on nitpicking. The truth is, the advantages and the challenges of TDD are less an aspect of the concept and more a result of the idiosyncratic way it is applied. To understand the promise of TDD we need to understand its basic concepts. The …